Just how welcoming or well-equipped a place is Coventry, actually, for someone wanting to make a career in the arts? How do people find out what is going on and how they can get involved? Did we expect that winning City of Culture would fix everything? Were there things about the city that weren’t working, and that the failure of the City of Culture Trust has magnified or made worse? And – going forwards – can we (and do we want to) reclaim the concept of ‘legacy’, working together to harness the collective power of the sector for the benefit of the entire city?
These are some of the things that the F13 network (or flow) of artists and creative practitioners has been grappling with since the news broke about the collapse of the City of Culture Trust. We’ve been thinking about how we channel our anger, frustration, disappointment and sadness. How we might use this bruising experience to imagine how our city might build back better: if we work together, what change might we be able to achieve for ourselves, for those just starting out, and for those who come after? How might we, collectively, create the conditions for creation, and leave Coventry a better place than we found it?
These conversations have evolved over the last couple of months into a draft set of suggestions or recommendations for what we might need to put in place to ‘create the conditions for creation’. It’s the start of a conversation and action plan and if you are an artist or creative practitioner based in the city – we’d really like you to read it and feed back to us. The process of drafting the plan is described in this blog post, and the draft plan itself can be found here.
We hope that the action plan, when complete, will act as the basis for discussions with funders and decision-makers to devise ways that we might collaboratively improve relationships with, and create better conditions across, the arts sector in Coventry. A way to build something beautiful/meaningful/useful/transformational out of the experience of the last few years. It’s important to us that it remains a crowdsourced, grassroots plan that reflects the collective voice, and can be a mandate for the F13 working party (and Talking Birds and others, when representing F13) to feel confident that we are genuinely speaking for the sector.
Please take a look and let us know what you think.
Further reading
There’s a growing body of words on our blog site ‘Words from the Birds‘ exploring the murky ground around arts policy and the more specific issues thrown up by the failure of the City of Culture Trust (but in a less dry way than that sentence might suggest). You can find all these posts (which are tagged City of Culture) here.
If you’d be interested in writing a guest blog to add to the pieces already published, or have already written something that fits the bill, we’d be really interested to hear from you so please do get in touch.
talking birds 